The staff are the audience

The post went out yesterday, and the people who read it properly were not customers.

The customer saw a few hundred of them, in green, between family photographs and a cousin's video from the street, and gave each one the half second it deserved.

The people who read it were in the Riyadh office. The Saudi employees, the ones the company hired because it wanted to be in the Kingdom rather than sell into it, read it the way you read a card from someone whose opinion of you is still forming. Did the company show up. How. Was the Arabic right. Was anyone local asked, or did the line come from a regional team in another city, approved by someone who has never been here on the day.

That reading is the one that matters, and it is the one nobody in marketing plans for.

I have sat inside enough of these companies to know the sequence. The post is briefed as a customer message. It is judged, afterwards, on likes. Meanwhile the people who could actually tell whether it belonged were forwarding it to each other on the morning with one word, and it was not always a kind one.

A National Day post is hired for an internal job. It tells the Saudi staff whether the company they joined is here or visiting. It tells the people who have not joined yet the same thing, because they have a friend inside, and the friend forwards.

Get it wrong and nothing happens with customers. A stiff greeting in a green square costs no sales. Get it wrong two years running and something happens with the people who were deciding whether to stay, and that cost never appears in a marketing review, because the person who left was not in marketing.

The audience for the post was in the building. It still is.